How Comments Work on Preview Deployments

Pull request owners receive emails whenever a new comment is created. Comment creators and participators in comment threads will receive email notifications alerting them to new activity within those threads. Anyone in your Vercel Team can leave comments on your previews by default. On Pro and Enterprise Vercel plans you can enable comments from Vercel accounts outside of your teams as well.

When changes are pushed to a PR, and a new Preview Deployment has been generated, a popup modal in the bottom-right corner will prompt you to refresh your view.

The popup modal that alerts you when you are viewing an outdated Preview Deployment. Select the Refresh button to refresh your view.

Comments are visible over your project's UI at the Preview Deployment URL.

When you open a Preview Deployment with comments enabled, there will be a toolbar near the bottom of your browser that will prompt you to log into your Vercel account to leave a comment. You can drag this toolbar anywhere.

The comments toolbar in a Preview Deployment.

After successfully logging in, the toolbar will display buttons allowing one to:

• Leaving a comment
• Checking the Inbox to see all comments in the Preview Deployment
• Sharing the Preview Deployment URL
• Opening the options menu

Comments on each page are represented by the author's Vercel profile picture, allowing you to see at a glance which Team members and participants have left feedback.

Anyone who has ever viewed your preview while logged into comments will appear as a profile picture on the menu bar.

Comments are enabled by default for all Preview Deployments on all new projects. By default, only members of your Vercel Team can contribute comments.

You can enable or disable comments at the account level with certain permissions. Navigate to your Vercel dashboard. Make sure that you have selected the personal account or team in question. In the account Settings tab, select On or Off in the dropdown menu under the Comments section.

The dashboard setting to enable or disable comments at the account level.

If comments are disabled for one of your projects, you can enable them from your Vercel dashboard. Go to your project Settings tab and select On from the dropdown menu under the Preview Comments section.

You can also disable comments for the current browser session at any time by clicking Disable for Session. To show the comments again, open a new browser session. This can be useful for performance testing or debugging.

You can show or hide the comments interface by using ⌘ + . on MacOS (Ctrl + . on Windows). This can be useful if the interface is getting in the way of your review and you need to hide it momentarily.

You can also enable or disable comments with preview environment variables.

By default, only members of your Vercel Team can contribute comments to a preview deployment. To enable comments from people outside of your team, you must update your Share settings.

To do so, select the Share icon in the comments toolbar. In the popup modal that appears, select the Anyone with the link option.

This will enable anyone with a Vercel account to provide feedback on your preview. They will only be able to access the preview if the URL is shared with them. They will be required to log in with their Vercel account.

People you share a Preview Deployment with will not be automatically added to your Vercel Team.

You can secure a Preview Deployment that grants access to Anyone with the link if you're on a Pro or Enterprise plan. Pro and Enterprise Teams can keep their Preview Deployments secure by enabling password protection on their projects. This feature is unavailable on Hobby accounts.

See our docs on sharing preview URLs to learn more.

If you want to log into comments on a Preview Deployment that doesn't allow comments from people outside the Team that owns it, you can request access. To do so, you must be part of the organization that owns the project in the git provider the project is hosted on. For example, if your git provider is GitHub, you must be in the GitHub org that owns the GitHub repo the preview is being deployed from.

If you are part of the Team that owns the project in Vercel, you will be able to log in without requesting access. Check which teams you're on here.

To learn more, read our docs on requesting access, and ensure you've joined our suggested teams.